A group of motherboard enthusiasts working for GIGABYTE, sharing their insider knowledge and general ramblings of the motherboard business, the tech industry, latest technologies and trends, and other random odds and ends.

Friday, September 27, 2013

I know it’s the second time this week that I’m plugging a Tiny ‘Tom’ Logan video, but to be honest I just can’t get enough of this guy. Cracks me up no end. Today’s video involves our very first AMD platform G1.Killer gaming board, the G1.Sniper A88X motherboard. Tom doesn’t attempt a full (epic 30 mins?!) vid here, it’s more of a preview or first look, but as you’d expect, Tom covers all the features and technologies and gives you a really good overview of a one of our most eagerly anticipated boards.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Yesterday we officially announced the winners of our ‘Pi is Returned’ contest on HWBOT.org. We had $5,000 USD up for grabs with four stages centered on the classic Super Pi benchmark. As my buddy Dino has posted a few times already, the contest inspired a few overclockers to break couple of AMD world records – in fact several records were repeatedly smashed on the finale weekend alone.

Here are the final standings including, nationality, scores and winnings.

TeamAU guys visited ReSpawn LAN over the weekend to put on a demonstration of GIGABYTE and Intel X79 + Ivy Bridge E (4960X) and also the ever so popular Z87X-OC + 4770K. They showed off the multithreading power of new Intel Ivy Bridge E CPUs and on second day decided to do some world record benching attempts and it proved successful.

Dinos22, Youngpro and SniperOz from the team in attendance over the weekend put together a couple of impressive scores. One was #5 3DMARK01 and second was #1 3DMARK06. For more info on the team and photo gallery visit the team’s facebook page.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Looks like people behind Steam (most popular gaming platforms through which PC gamers buy, interact and play games) are about to make a dash for a dedicated operating system. Project is running full steam ahead to create a new living room PC platform with a brand spanking new OS called SteamOS.

As we’ve been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that theenvironment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself.SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen.It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines.

This is a development that has been some time in the making I must say. With various console platforms around, some console based gamers have been saying that the key area where they prefer console over PC is in fact it’s in their living room, connected to their big LCD TV. This is what Steam seems to be looking to cover to bridge that gap.

Nvidia is also talking up 4K gaming and we all know that PCs are now significantly more powerful than consoles already and this will be a lot more evident when we start seeing mass produced/sold 4K TVs. PC PowerPlay article in Australia has an interesting read about state of things to come courtesy of Tony Tomasi’s thoughts in a recent interview. These 4K TVs have already been on sale in some countries for a while and the economies of scale will no doubt see the price lower into acceptable levels for ordinary people to be able to afford one. There are already 50” 4K TVs on sale in USA for $1500! PC GPUs in a living room PC look like the perfect fit for this new resolution standard.

Interesting times ahead! Time for all component manufacturers to thing about small and quiet high powered living room design PCs I think.

We’ve just come across a YouTube video from GGF LAN guys reviewing the new GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H. Stuart was particularly impressed with the UEFI bios and spent most of the review discussing it in detail. You should check it out!

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

What an incredible weekend of overclocking we just had. If there ever was a need for some professional shoutcasting that can run over the weekend, this was the right time as this competition had more twists and turns than a hundred German pretzels! For those of you unaware of the competition let me first introduce it for you.

HWBOT hosted the competition based on AMD A & FX series platforms with up to $5000 cash prizes from GIGABYE & AMD. The main benchmark was a system benchmark, SuperPi, which calculates Pi to 1 million and 32 million digits. I’ve just grabbed all the math nerd attentions in one sentence right?!? Overclocking is very number/stat intensive. The benchmark has been around for a long time and is an interesting and reasonable reliable way to tell the performance of platforms apart. There is an element of tweaking involved which requires platform/system tuning and some OS tuning. It needs liquid nitrogen not only on CPU but also memory as it directly affects efficiency (how fast you can complete calculation with same system parameters).

The stages had SuperPi 1M & 32M on both platforms with $500 top prize with a bonus $500 if the overclocker takes the platform world record. Did world records get taken, oh yes. Are all bonus cash prizes reached including bonus rounds, YES. It gets crazier, on some categories even 10th spot could have won the extra $500 cash prize as world records kept tumbling from day 1 literally!

The whole month during this competition saw overclocking upping the new record mark until The Stilt from Finland dropped a bombshell on the last day taking out all 4 categories. It looked impossible to beat but beaten it did get in FM2 categories by an impressive overclock from DFORDOG from China reaching an incredible 7869MHz 1M SuperPi on A10-6800K and GIGABYTE F2A85X-UP4 and Wizerty from France edging out The Stilt in SuperPi round by the merest of margins taking home $1K each for their effort.

The Stilt was unbeaten with the 990FXA-UD7 and FX9370 clocking at a monster 8160MHz 1M and 7876MHz 32M to take out $2K in prizes for those two scores with help of $500 bonus world records for each category win!

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Our buddy and co-worker here at GIGABYTE HQ Janus had a pretty old school amplifier at home that he was thinking to upgrade. Despite being pretty long in the tooth, it was still in regular daily use, connected to a set-top box, DVD player, laptop and Wii outputting to a set of 5.1 speakers.

But instead of shipping the old amp off to the proverbial glue-farm, Janus had a deviously ingenious idea – how’s about modifying this amplifier to combine it with a PC, basically using the chassis to house the PC components while still retaining the original functionality of the AV amplifier. The image above shows the final build running Windows 7. Let's check out the steps involved in the project.

Tape? Blimey. We’re talking really, really old school.

So on the PC side of things, Janus opted to base the system around a GIGABYTE H87N-WiFi motherboard, sporting an Intel i5 4430 CPU. The H87N-WIFI is a Mini-ITX board measuring only 17cm x 17cm, considerably smaller than any ATX or even MicroATX board. When you consider the other components that will be installed inside the amplifier, it makes perfect sense to opt for the more compact Mini-ITX form factor board. Step1: Modify CPU cooler and Insulate Motherboard One of the first issues that Janus encountered was the fact that the Intel stock cooler was just too high, and impossible to accommodate in the amplifier’s chassis. The easiest solution was to first remove the fan on top of the heatsink and replace it with a shorter one. Sure, he could have looked at other compatible aftermarket solutions, but this seemed the cheaper and easiest solution – and as you can see the result is pretty simple and effective.

Modify CPU cooler.

Another potential issue was the motherboard (or indeed the PC) coming in contact with the amplifier components and causing electrical shorting. To eliminate any such issues, Janus used a plastic sheet to insulate the board, held in place with regular insulation tape. Again, a simple but effective way to help safely integrate the PC components into the amplifier.

Motherboard insulated

Step2: Attach Power and Hard Drive LEDs.Interestingly the amplifier itself had two regular microphone jacks on the front panel - originally included to satisfy any karaoke urges one might have. Janus had the cool of removing the actual audio jack sockets and replacing them with power and hard drive LEDs for the PC. Pretty cool, no? Add Power LED and HDD LED Step3: Cut the amplifier for install MB I/O shell Possibly the most difficult aspect of the build involved taking a drill to modify the amplifier case to make a hole large enough to fit the motherboard’s IO back panel. The edges were then filled down to make a smooth edge. BTW, I can personally attest to the fact that this was, without doubt the noisiest part of the build… Cut the amplifier for install MB I/O shell Step4: A minor hiccup.All the drilling, hacking and filling meant that the amplifier front panel actually took a bit of a hiding, with several scratches and blemishes. The solution? Simply remove and spray paint the panel a nice even black.

Paint

Step5: Modifying the Power CableThe idea was for both the amplifier and PC to use the same power cable. i.e. turn on the PC and the amplifier would also be on. The easy solution was to integrate a power splitter into the case that could be attached to the outside power button, thus powering both PC and amp.

Change power cable design.

Step6: Installing SSD, Power Supply and MotherboardFinally we see some shots of the key components being installed into the amplifier chassis. These include the motherboard (inc. CPU and memory), a 60GB SSD, a compact 170 watt mini-ITX Power Supply plus all the cables needed to connect it all together including LED lights and the power button.

Install SSD, power, MB...Step7: Final check...So before sealing up the PC, Janus ran a quick system test, making sure the rig booted to Windows and all components were properly detected and installed. After that the final task is to close up the chassis, stand back and admire a job well done. Nice work Janus…

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Colin and the gang from the US office headed to San Francisco earlier this week to attend IDF 2013. By the looks of things he ran into our buddies from TweakTown who were keen to get an early look at a few of the newer boards were showcasesing at the event, including the newly launched Z87X-UD5 TH board plus the forthcoming Z87X-UD7 TH – both featuring dual Thunderbolt ports.

Check out the video below and you’ll also get a sneak preview of our forthcoming G1-Killer G1. Assassin 3 motherboard which is based on the X79 platform and boasts a plethora of new audio features including USB DAC-UP and upgradable OP-Amps.

For those of you keen to follow this contest, check it out over at HWBOT. i.nfraR.ed is currently leading the competition ahead of ivanov from Poland and Radi from France. Radi has put up a monster score with the F2A85X-UP4 and AMD A10-6800K running at 7.5GHz to lead that stage. He is also eligible for the world record $ prize with this score. Let’s see what the next week brings!

I’ve also noticed that Christian Ney and OCAHolic guys have been busy bees SMASHING the latest PCMARK7 world record by some margin on the GIGABYTE Z87X-OC board and GTX780OCv2 GPU. Well done there guys, very cool!

Last but not least is a pretty sweet overclock from TeamAU’s latest member, Jack (aka JJJC), who is currently preparing for MOA 2013 competition and testing his favourite benching board GIGABYTE Z87X-OC with a competition GPU and reaching #4 fastest global 3DMARK05 reaching a whopping 70,626points. Good luck at MOA Jack! You can check out all the scores from TeamAU guys on their facebook page.

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

A week or so ago our German team held an extreme overclocking competition at the University of Heilbronn. Focused heavily on the new Haswell platform, key movers and shakers from HWBOT that are based in Germany we in attendance. Check out the video below, there’s a good chance you’ll spot a few familiar faces having fun.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

SniperOz from TeamAU moves into #3 spot in HWBOT OC League (i.e. non-sponsored extreme OC league that use retail hardware) with a some monster scores using a GIGABYTE Z87X-OC and GTX Titan. Most impressive scores were single card world records in Unigine Heaven DX11 Extreme Preset and 3DMARK03 achieved last week.